Out of Sight, Out of Mind
by Donteatacowman
Summary: After getting out of the Unknown, Wirt's been chasing a distractible Greg all over the continent. They've given up on facing their troubles, but when they reach Gravity Falls, how much of that will change? Dipper and Mabel will be forced to take this recent weirdness seriously once they realize there's a puppet master behind the scenes that they've had to deal with before...
1. Chapter 1

"Wait up, Greg!" Wirt hollered. He could already see the tea kettle receding over the horizon, sun glinting through the metal. Wirt groaned, speeding up to catch up. That kid. The littlest thing could divert his attention-this time it had been a woodpecker that Greg was absolutely sure had made eye contact with him, meaning, of course, that they were destined to be best friends.

"A sign!" he was shouting to Wirt now, apparently having stopped his pursuit to wait for his older brother, a rare but welcome break.

"A sign of what?" Wirt called. Probably a sign of Greg and the woodpecker's everlasting friendship. "Greg, most birds can't talk, I'm sure the woodpecker just wants to get back to his… bird… family… without getting bugged by some-"

"A falls sign!"

"Wha-?" Wirt finally edged up the hill far enough to see Greg and a billboard. Great. A tourist town. "Gravity Falls is the name of the town, Greg," he said after reading it. "They must have a waterfall or something. Probably a lot of mosquitos and tourists."

"And woodpeckers!"

"Yeah. And woodpeckers," Wirt acknowledged. Greg's best friend was hammering his beak into the billboard wood like there was no tomorrow, so Greg was already proven correct.

"Do woodpeckers get along with frogs?"

"I, I dunno, Greg. I think some birds eat tadpoles, but Jason Funderburker is way too old to even fit in its mouth. And a woodpecker mostly eats bugs in trees, right? They have those huge tongues that wrap behind their skulls to cushion the impact when they drill into the bark, and then they use those to fish out some kind of insects. I've never heard of one being in marshland, but it's not like I'm an expert. Do woodpeckers and frogs even share a climate? How, how far away from home do you think we are, Greg?" Wirt rambled a while as Greg shimmied up the billboard to get closer to the bird, pulling Jason Funderburker from under his teapot as a means of introducing the two.

Greg made an "I dunno" sound. "If they're friends, woodpeckers and frogs share everything, because sharing is caring," he said happily. "That's a frog fact."

Wirt gave him a grateful look. He wasn't particularly enlightened by Greg's stream of made-up facts, but they made him remember the Rock Facts Rock they'd left in Mrs. Daniels' garden. And how Greg almost hadn't had the chance to do so. He almost wanted to do something sappy, but the moment quickly slipped away as Greg did, right off the billboard.

"Greg!" Wirt shouted, sprinting forward, but Greg picked himself up like it was nothing and gave the okay sign.

"I'm right as rain, brother o' mine!"

Wirt laughed shakily in relief, running a hand through his hair and dislodging his hat. "Yeah… yeah. Don't scare me like that!"

Greg frowned. "It's not like it would _hurt_."

"You don't know that. You were really high up!"

"I do so know that!" Greg argued, meandering away from the billboard down the highway, further into town. "I just tested it! Scientifically!"

"That's not what science is."

Jason Funderburker hopped at their heels, croaking.

"See? It's two against one, Wirt!"

"Frogs don't get a vote."

"Do so!"

Wirt stooped to pick up the frog, who croaked again. "Oh, whoop, he just changed his mind. He says I'm right."

Greg stopped short, his expression stricken with betrayal. "Jason Funderburker, how _could_ you?!"

Wirt laughed, dropping the frog on Greg's tea kettle as the two of them wandered deeper into Gravity Falls, disappearing unnoticed into the early morning mist.

* * *

The town wasn't big. They'd been through dozens of towns just like it, or very similar, anyway. It was a picturesque little place surrounded and invaded by woods that had Wirt murmuring things like, "From the beginning to the end, an army of treetops invades my senses, an ouroboros of arboreal infinities." That, in turn, led to a small lecture on what an "ouroboros" was, and then a heated argument between the siblings over whether a snake could truly eat itself. (Wirt maintained that no, it could swallow partway before it would be too full and couldn't fit, and anyway what kind of real snake would eat itself; while Greg focused on whether a snake biting its tail could be used as a wheel on a bicycle if necessary.)

From a hilly outcrop the two boys could see the Falls for which the town got its name, as well as a sprawling cliff that Greg said looked like a UFO had crashed into it, though Wirt told him that was patently ridiculous. A water tower with a muffin on it got Greg's attention and they spent an hour climbing it and enjoying the view.

From the top, Greg waved enthusiastically down to the few people who were up so early in the morning. "Hey, do you think any of them have a phone?" he asked Wirt.

"Probably," Wirt said. It was weird being so high up without feeling the wind tousling his hair; he thought about that, dangling his fingers down over the guardrail. "Why?"

"Because you kept wanting to find one before and you haven't got one yet."

It took Wirt a second to realize what Greg meant. "In Pottsfield? That was different, Greg. I'm pretty sure they don't have phones in the Unknown."

"But they do in Gravity Falls?"

"Yeah. They're not much use to us now, though."

Greg nodded wisely, rubbing his chin. "Because phone booths cost a quarter, and I threw out our cents."

Wirt opened his mouth but rethought his response, finally saying, "Something like that."

"Maybe we'll find some loose change!"

"Maybe." Wirt readjusted his hat, then grabbed the ladder, swinging down over it. "Hey, I think I saw a bear in the woods. Wanna go check that out?"

"Local wildlife!" Greg said excitedly, clambering through Wirt and down the ladder. "Let's go let's go! Maybe the bear knows the woodpecker and they can get us in good with the secret forest animal club and..." His voice faded as he went down.

Wirt laughed and followed him. "Wait! Wait up, Greg!"

But Greg was gone by the time Wirt reached the ground. "Not again," he groused to himself, spinning around and scanning the horizon line for a kettle. Wirt huffed, but headed in the direction he'd seen the bear.

Following Greg around was a full-time job, Wirt decided as he went above the treetops to look around and saw only dense foliage. He should be fairly compensated. When they were able to talk again, Wirt decided he'd ask his mom for babysitting money. Paid retroactively. On special nights where his parents went out and he'd gotten stuck watching Greg, he got about three bucks an hour. And if they'd been in the Unknown for, say, a week and a half… and he spent about half that time actually watching Greg… Not to mention all this time since they'd gotten back from the Unknown… Wirt was so focused on his mental calculations that he didn't notice Greg til he'd nearly walked right through him.

"It's the bear!" Greg told Wirt as though they hadn't separated at all. Wirt looked where Greg pointed. And nearly jumped out of his skin.

"What, wha, what, what's _wrong_ with it?!"

One of the bear's many heads lifted to sniff the air curiously.

"Nothing," said Greg. "It's a good bear." And he made as if to go pet it.

" _Greg_ ," Wirt said in a harsh whisper. " _Don't_!"

Greg's had hovered over the bear's pelt, the fur rising to nearly meet the surface of his palm.

And then the bear said, "Who's there?" in a deep rumbling voice, and Wirt shouted, " _Running now!"_ and didn't wait for Greg to follow until he had scrambled a few hundred feet away.

Greg said "Goodbye, mister bear!" and followed Wirt, saying, "Run, run, run!" as if they were playing a game. Wirt turned and kept sprinting until they were spat out of the forest and back onto the outskirts of Gravity Falls.

Greg laughed, not out of breath at all. Wirt tried to scold him, but found that he was laughing too. "Wha, haha, what _was_ that thing?!"

"It was a bear!"

"Yeah, but we haven't seen anything like that since, y'know, since we left the Unknown!" Wirt slowly stopped laughing and frowned at the forest. "What was with all those heads? Was it mutated or something?"

"I think," Greg said with a smile, "Gravity Falls is full of magic."

Wirt shook his head but smiled back. "Yeah, okay, Greg."

"And mystery!"

"Mhmm."

"So I'm gonna go in and see." Greg eyed the huge building they were next to, dazzled by the arrows and signs proclaiming the greatest mysteries of the world being held inside.

"Alright." Wirt stared at the treeline. "Wait. Go in where?"

When he turned his head, Greg was already running into the Mystery Shack.


	2. Chapter 2

Wirt pushed through the Shack door, shouting for Greg without caring who heard. But this place was almost as weird as what they'd seen in the forest, and he had to stop to take it all in. Wirt seemed to be in a gift shop, strangers milling around and looking at merchandise. But amongst the normal snow globes, postcards, and bumper stickers, Wirt saw several brains in jars, some obviously fake ancient artifacts and at least one Olmec slab that _didn't_ seem fake, a bizarre number of disembodied eyeballs, some kind of… fetus… some skulls and taxidermy, all of it tacky and in bad taste. The prices would have been enough to drive Wirt out if he was in there by choice.

A gravelly voice shouted something about a tour over the din of customer chat, and people started grouping together. Wirt went with the flow, uncomfortable and trying to hunch up his shoulders to bury himself in his cape, but as usual no one noticed him.

"Greg," he tried calling out in a hushed voice as the tour began. He peered behind six-pack-a-lopes and beavercorns, between sascrotches and treasure chests, and briefly gave up the search to stare with the rest of the tourists at the World's Most Distracting Object. It wasn't until it stopped spinning and the tour group's wallets were empty that Wirt remembered his mission, breaking away from the cluster of people to poke around the Shack.

It really was a weird place. Nowadays it took a lot to give Wirt the heebie-jeebies, but something about this building was bizarre and it was setting his nerves on edge. He almost decided that Greg must have left the Shack when he noticed the Employees Only door in the gift shop.

Greg could read; he would know he _shouldn't_ go in there. But when had that ever stopped him?

Wirt gathered his resolve and went straight through the door, deciding it would be a quick in-and-out operation. Checking if Greg were nearby and then getting the heck out of dodge. It's not like he was worried about being _caught_ , but still, they were _trespassing_ and it was _rude_.

"Greg?" he called a few times. "Are you in here?" Greg didn't answer, but that was far from a real "no." Wirt checked the second floor, mostly just an attic with some kids' bedroom and no kids, then went back downstairs. "Greg!" he scolded, finally seeing his brother perched above a decorative dinosaur skull.

"Shh," Greg shushed sharply and pointed in front of him. The television was on, a tween-looking brunette girl stretched out on the floor watching it.

"Greg, this is her house, we gotta get out of here," Wirt said, almost reaching forward to tug on Greg's sleeve before he thought better of it. "You wouldn't like it if someone broke into our house, right?"

"Lorna didn't mind!" Greg said, staring at the tv.

Wirt said, "That was different. We came in on accident and then she let us stay there. These people don't even know…" But just like with the Distracting Object, Wirt found his attention drawn to the screen. It felt like forever since he or Greg had gotten to just sit in front of a television and just watch it like normal kids. It wasn't much, just a reality show about babies fighting that Wirt had the vague suspicion he shouldn't let Greg watch for fear of him mimicking the violence.

So they sat back and stared at the tv, watching as Baby Madison advanced to the next round, the show ended, and another program called Cash Wheel came on. Wirt and Greg watched attentively as if they'd be tested on it, Greg still over the dinosaur skull and Wirt easing himself to be in a big chair.

But halfway through Cash Wheel, someone further in the house called "Mabel?" and the girl, who Wirt and Greg had nearly forgotten about, turned off the show.

"In here, bro-bro!"

Wirt and Greg shrugged at each other. So much for that. "Time to go now?" Wirt asked as a boy trotted in the living room, holding a book.

"Who won the game?" Greg asked as the kids started talking to each other.

"We're not gonna find out," Wirt said, standing up with a stretch. "The guy with the funny hairdo had the most points though."

"That girl just landed on the cash shower, though!"

"Yeah, so maybe she won in the end. It doesn't really matter."

"It doesn't matter!" Greg echoed agreeably, sliding off the dinosaur skull. "What are they reading?"

"They? Oh, these guys." Wirt peered around the strange boy's shoulder. "It's some kind of notebook. It's got drawings in it."

"Does it have the bear?"

"I can't really tell from here," Wirt said impatiently, narrowing his eyes and tilting his head as if he could see in between the pages if he tried hard enough. "Maybe we should shush and listen to what they're saying."

For once Greg obeyed, and the brothers stood quietly eavesdropping the conversation between the two strangers.

"The note he left, though," the girl, Mabel, was saying. "That was really… intense, Dipper." Her voice trailed off.

The boy, Dipper, put down the book to squeeze her shoulder. "Yeah," he said quietly. "Yeah, it was. I'm sorry about Gabe."

Mabel shook her head, her hair almost flying in Greg's face. " _You're_ sorry? I almost screwed things up _forever_. And I almost listened to him. I almost trusted _Bill_ over you!"

Dipper closed the book, to Wirt's dismay. "Why didn't you? I mean, I did. I'm the idiot who made the deal in the first place."

"He said something that, um, made me think, is all. Made me realize how you-" Mabel got cut off by a shout from the gift shop.

"Hey! Kids!" Wirt recognized the rough voice as his tour guide, Mr. Mystery. "Get out here! We got a bus fulla suckers coming in and I need help to bleed 'em dry!"

Dipper tucked the book into his vest, smiling crookedly. "Duty calls?"

"You think he'd at least give you a day off," Mabel said with a duplicate smile. "Hey. Awkward sibling hug?"

Wirt looked away, clearing his throat and trying to get Greg to do the same as the two kids embraced, enunciating their "pat, pat"s. Wirt had just wanted to get a look at Dipper's book, not intrude on such a private conversation.

"Let's get outta here, Greg," he said, following the two kids as they walked toward the gift shop door. Greg nodded, stretching up to drag Jason Funderburker out of a pet amphibian tank he had dropped him into for friend-making purposes.

But as Dipper and Mabel left, they said something that made the brothers freeze in their tracks and decide they weren't leaving the Mystery Shack quite as soon as expected.

"I'm just glad you're back in the land of the living, broseph," Mabel was saying.

"Yeah," Dipper replied. "I can't imagine being stuck as a ghost _forever_."

The door swung shut behind the twins, leaving Greg and Wirt's spirits staring slack-jawed after them.


	3. Chapter 3

After a moment of silence, Greg turned to Wirt. "Did you hear that?"

"Yeah," Wirt said disbelievingly.

"He was like us! He was a ghost!"

Wirt winced. He didn't like the reminder of their current forms. It seemed like an inescapable fact, given that the two of them couldn't touch anything, not even themselves or each other, but Wirt worked hard for the illusion of normalcy. The last several months traipsing across the country almost seemed like their days in the Unknown. How skewed were their perceptions, though, that wandering alone seemed "normal" now? "It sounded like that's what he meant," Wirt said eventually. _Wirt_ , at least, wasn't going to say the word "ghost." It felt taboo. "That is what it seemed like, right? That he'd made a deal with some guy named Bill, then got turned into a ghost, and then got back somehow?"

Greg tapped the air around his chin, literally walking through the door into the gift shop and correctly assuming Wirt would follow. "Is Bill the Beast's first name?"

Wirt sputtered in response to the weird tangent. "No, Greg. The Beast doesn't have a first name."

"But how do you know?"

"He's _the Beast_. It, he, how would something like _him_ have a first name?"

"His mom gave it to him," Greg said with a shrug.

"The Beast doesn't have a mom!" Wirt said stubbornly. The idea was absurd. "And even if he did, no self-respecting, shadowy... otherworldly... _entity_ is gonna have the first name _Bill_."

"How about Jerome?"

"The Beast's name isn't Jerome!" The tangent occupied the two boys for several minutes, merely the latest in an infinitely long list of petty arguments that kept them entertained. It had been months since anyone had heard or spoken to the brothers besides each other. Other people's goings-on were less important, so the conversation occupied them as Dipper and Mabel weaved in and out of the rooms of the Shack, sometimes in costume and other times standing behind the register or setting out merchandise.

But Greg abruptly agreed with Wirt, stood up, and left Wirt to go back through the employees-only door. Wirt groaned and followed. "Where are we going?"

It was almost a rhetorical question, but Greg answered, "Let's snoop through their stuff!" as he ascended the stairs.

"Oh, yeah," Wirt thought aloud. "There were bedrooms up there-they must have been Dipper and Mabel's. Maybe one of them has something up there that would help us know what happened? A diary or note or something?" He walked as though he were going up stairs, feet hovering where the floor was, more or less. Greg usually followed his lead in pretending they had real, physical bodies, though at times like this he got caught up in his emotions and started floating or phasing through objects. Not that they had much choice; when the door was closed, they had little recourse but to walk straight through it.

"Wrong door, Greg!" Wirt said, following his brother. "This one's just the attic."

"An attic full of clues!" Greg corrected him. "And this detective and his trusty sidekick are on the case!"

"Why do _I_ have to be the sidekick?"

"Cuz I'm solving the mystery and you're the funny one."

"I'm the funny one?" Wirt said disbelievingly. But his voice cracked as he said it, so Greg laughed at him, leaving Wirt to scowl and sulk.

"Now look here, Commissioner," Greg said. But to Wirt's displeasure, he was talking to the frog. "What do you suppose this suspicious laptop's for?" Greg was pointing at a bent, beat-up laptop near the window.

"It's an attic, Greg. It's where people store broken old stuff." Wirt wandered to a mirror, squinting at it. If animals like the mutated bear could sometimes sense that Wirt and Greg were nearby, maybe even as a ghost, Wirt would be slightly visible? But no matter which way he turned his head, all he saw were dust motes streaming down in the sunlight as it hit a triangular windowpane.

Wirt turned to look at the window. No, nothing could see them. But something about the eye in the stained glass made him feel like he was being watched. "There's nothing here. Let's go to the bedroom."

"No, Wirt, this stuff is Mabel's! It's gotta have clues!" Greg was eyeing a box labeled "MABEL" in multicolor letters, notable only for the insane number of sock puppets spilling out of it..

Wirt walked up to check it out. "She must have put on a puppet show," he said as he spotted another box, nearly identical, but with the words "FOR PLAY" written on the side. "Geez, what kind of puppet-crazy-"

"It's a clue!" Greg proclaimed.

"Oh, yeah, I'm _sure_ a moldy box of socks, a broken laptop, and that Dipper kid being a ghost is all interconnected," Wirt retorted.

"Maybe he went to the Unknown like us," Greg said, crawling around some broken Mystery Shack promotional signs to look through the rest of the junk in storage. "Because the socks were so stinky he got sick!"

"Makes sense."

"And he passed out and dropped the laptop down the stairs!"

"How'd it get back up here then?"

"That's _another_ mystery." Greg was leaving the room, Wirt at his heels, as they meandered their way into the actual bedroom of the twins. It held another triangle window and another weird feeling crawling up Wirt's neck.

Mabel and Dipper were messy, their books and clothes strewn everywhere. Still, it was easy enough to see the divide between the siblings' halves of the bedroom. One half had backpacks, binoculars, books, and a corkboard covered in string, while the other held boy-band posters, pink bedding, and a Mabel sock puppet on the headboard.

"Jerome's lantern!" Greg said with a gasp, pointing at an oil lantern on Dipper's half of a bedside table.

"Psht," was Wirt's response as he climbed over the bed to get a better look at the corkboard. "Hey, hey, look at this. These might be actual clues."

Greg crawled alongside Wirt. "Bill," he read the caption on a crudely drawn picture of a triangle in a top hat and bow tie. "That's Bill?"

"This board says it's supposed to be about 'Big Mysteries,'" Wirt said with a frown. "Maybe you were right. Is Bill supposed to be the triangle's name?" He stared at an instant camera photo of some aspens. "Why is there a picture of the forest?"

"The string's connecting it to Dipper's book," Greg observed.

"You're right!" Wirt searched the board. "Looks like he's been trying to figure out the author of that book, and Bill's somehow connected to it?" There was more, stuff about a kid named Gideon and the founder of Gravity Falls. "Maybe, uh. Maybe this kid's just nuts. I mean, there's no way this is all real, is it?"

Greg frowned. "Mabel thought it was."

"Yeah, and there was that, that talking bear, so maybe… This town isn't anything like the Unknown, right? We're not back there." Wirt looked to Greg helplessly for confirmation.

"Gravity Falls is its own place, Wirt," Greg said soberly. "It's got its own mysteries. Dipper's trying to solve them just like we are."

Wirt fidgeted. "I guess." He turned to stare out the window, watching the people below. "I wish we could talk to them."

Greg trotted to the window, leaning over it. "Dipper! Mabel!" he screamed out.

Wirt waited for a reply before he realized that was ridiculous. "They can't hear you."

"You said we should talk to them!"

"And have them talk back," Wirt said impatiently.

Greg's mouth made an "o" and Wirt groaned.

"Let's see if they heard us, then," Greg suggested.

"They didn't." But Greg was already letting himself fall through the floor and down to the ceiling of the first floor.

Wirt muttered to himself unhappily but followed, taking the stairs down properly.

He didn't notice the eye from the corkboard twist to the side as it followed him, still watching.


	4. Chapter 4

"-sh Wheel had the _hugest_ hair, you should have seen him, Dipper! Almost as big as Gideon's!" As Wirt climbed downstairs, staring at the white void where his feet should have been, he started to hear the girl's voice.

Greg wasn't watching them yet, though; he seemed transfixed by a mounted fish on the wall that a gift shop customer was watching. The customer, a little mustached man, kept pressing a button and giggling when the fish started to sing.

"I thought we were listening to Dipper and Mabel, Greg."

"Just a sec! I don't know what this salmon's selling, but I'm buying," Greg said. Wirt harrumped and walked to the twins to hear them easier.

"Now that could be a game show all in itself." Dipper, perched on a barrel near the check-out counter of the gift shop, balled a fist and deepened his voice. "Two huge hairdos fight for dominance! Two 'dos enter, one 'do leaves!"

"The winner shaves the loser's head!" Mabel narrowed her eyes. "After they _kill them_."

"Too dark, Mabel, dial it back a notch." Dipper laughed.

Mabel giggled. "Sorry, sorry. You know game shows always bring out my bloodlust." She tried to make her voice scary and failed miserably.

"Hard to believe you and Stan are related."

"Sarcasm's not your strong point," Mabel said. She was playing with the hooves of a chubby pig that Greg began fawning over once the salmon shut up. The tour group was thinning out by now and the few remaining customers gave Mabel an odd look, but a pig running around indoors was just more of the hick charm of this place. Or so Wirt guessed.

"Why is there a pig inside?" he still asked Greg tiredly.

Greg shrugged. "Why is there a frog inside?" He held up Jason Funderburker for emphasis.

As a customer left the shop, Dipper pulled his book from an inner pocket of his vest along with a pen. Mabel groaned. "Can't you leave that thing alone for one day? It's got us in enough trouble."

Dipper clicked the pen a few times. "We've got some downtime now, right? And I still haven't written about the Bill thing. I want to do it while it's fresh in my mind."

Seeing his chance, Wirt hurried to Dipper's side. But Greg had the same idea and they were squished against each other for a second-or, more accurately, through each other. They still couldn't touch anything as ghosts, and their body parts phased through. It was weird and uncomfortable and Wirt scooted back, leaving Greg to stare at the book as Dipper flipped through it.

"Dinosaurs!" Greg said, sticking a finger in between the pages.

"Wait, really?" Wirt said, trying to get a better look, but the page was already covered up. Instead, there was a page covered in pink handwriting with a disturbing caricature of Dipper, if Dipper was a ticked-off priest stuck in the middle of a tornado. "Woah," Wirt said at the same time Dipper did.

"You wrote an entry about him?" Dipper said to Mabel, stunned.

Mabel stopped playing with her pig and turned away. "Yeah, it was just… it was really scary. And I knew you'd want to write about it but you were asleep, so…"

Dipper scanned the page. He seemed to be a much faster reader than Wirt. Before Wirt had finished the first page, Dipper drew his hand across the open book. Wirt grit his teeth, annoyed, since the hand covered most of the text.

"You didn't have to do that." Dipper sounded touched.

"Yeah, well, just read the last bit."

Dipper's hand moved again and Wirt nudged in closer, reading over his shoulder. There was a note taped in the book, and once he'd read the first two sentences, Wirt said, "Greg, don't read this" warningly.

"I wanna see!" Greg said.

"No way, you're too little for this," he said, feeling cold as he read some of the more horrifying bits of the note. It was written by someone else, someone who wasn't Dipper or Mabel-and it seemed obvious to Wirt that Bill was the one describing his possession and intended suicide. Definitely not kid stuff. "Go investigate the pig or something."

"If there were clues, they _would_ be hidden in a pig," Greg agreed reluctantly.

"Wait, wait, it says something here-'his mental form will wander in the mindscape forever,'" Wirt read cautiously. "Is that what happened to Dipper? And to us?"

"Dipper's not wandering anywhere forever," Greg disagreed. "He's right here."

"Right. He managed to figure out a way to get… un-possessed. But _we_ weren't possessed." Wirt's spirits sank. This felt like a dead end. "This isn't anything like our situation."

Dipper spoke then. "You owe me ice cream sandwiches?" He closed the book.

"For a week starting now," Mabel confirmed.

"That is something I would have _killed_ for in the mindscape." Dipper put his book away again, though he kept his pen out, chewing on the cap idly.

"What was that like, anyway?" Mabel said slowly. "Could you, like, see me the whole time?"

Dipper shook his head. "Part of it? It was like I was a ghost. Just, y'know, floating around. I couldn't feel anything or touch anything, and my feet were all white? I couldn't even touch _myself_.

"When I made the deal with Bill, he just yanked me out of my body. At first I was just following him around to try and keep him from stabbing me with forks or whatever. Then I was mostly floating around town 'cuz it's not like ghosts can ride in cars."

"I dunno, I read this one story on the internet where-" Mabel started.

"Okay, _mindscape_ ghosts can't ride in cars," he corrected. "I wasn't dead or anything though. I mean, I don't _think_ ," he said with a frown. "I didn't get any special ghost powers like the Dusk-2-Dawn ghosts."

"You got sock puppet powers!"

"Well, yeah. So I was following Bill around and then I tried to find you, but Bill said I couldn't be heard without a vessel, so while you were busy with the play…"

"You missed the first act?" Mabel asked, hurt.

Dipper deflated. "I mean, I think Grunkle Stan was recording it?"

"We're watching that whole thing asap," she said decisively. "And then I'm posting the recording on your Guide to the Unexplained channel."

Dipper considered the idea. "As long as I get to edit it."

"We'll see!"

As Dipper and Mabel talked, Wirt looked over at Greg with a huge grin. "Did you hear that?"

"Yessir, loyal sidekick!" Greg said, watching the pet pig intently. "But what does 'snort oink' mean in human language?"

"No!" Wirt shook his head. "Dipper was saying that a g-something like _us_ could be heard through a vessel! And the book kept talking about possession…"

"Possessel a vessel?" Greg wrapped his tongue around the unfamiliar words.

"No, possessing a vessel. A vessel is, well, technically it's anything you carry something in, like a vase is a vessel for flowers and water. Or sometimes it's a ship. But I think in this case it's talking about a body. And possessing means to hold something, but, like, I'm pretty sure this Bill guy took over Dipper's body? But Dipper got back, and I think he found some other body to take over to talk to Mabel about it for help," Wirt thought out loud, gesturing, as Greg floated away from him. "I wonder if that means we could talk to them? And have them hear us, I mean, and they could figure out how to get us home. But we'd need some kind of body and it would have to be empty because I don't think I could stand the ethical ramifications of overriding a conscious being's will, even temporarily. But it _is_ an emergency, but then again, we've done just fine for ourselves so far, and… Greg?"

But Greg, as usual, wasn't there anymore. Wirt was about to call for him, but he was cut off-and so were Dipper and Mabel, deep in puppet-related conversation.

" _I'm the singin' salmon, spendin' all day jammin'."_

Dipper and Mabel looked up at the same time. "I thought Tyler was our last customer," Mabel said, glancing around the empty store.

"He was," Dipper said, coming out from behind the counter. "Hello? Gift shop's closing soon!" he said, pushing aside clothes in racks to find their hidden guest.

" _I'm the singin' salmon, spendin' all day jammin'."_ The mounted fish craned its neck away from the wall with a motorized squeal, its mouth flopping open and closed like a puppet's.

"There's no one over there to push the button, Dipper," Mabel pointed out.

"Don't tell me that thing's broken." Dipper dragged his hand down his face. "I'm not spending the next week listening to the freaking salmon. I'm taking the batteries out."

" _I'm the singin' salmon, spendin' all day jammin'."_ The fish stared straight forward through cheesy plastic sunglasses.

"Not for long, you're not," Dipper said, prying the salmon off the wall and pulling an AA battery out of its compartment. "Ha!" he said, tossing the battery toward the trash can and missing.

" _I'm the singin' salmon, spendin' all day jammin'."_

Dipper and Mabel looked at each other wordlessly. Both were confused. Dipper brought the salmon to the shop's counter.

"That's… weird…" Mabel said cautiously.

She reached forward, but Dipper grabbed her hand. "Maybe, maybe don't push that button?"

The singin' salmon craned its neck forward again. Its sunglasses fell off, leaving the Hawaiian-shirted fish's dead eyes to bore into Dipper's and then Mabel's, unblinking.

" _Dipper_ ," it said slowly, agonizingly, with a mechanical screech. " _Mabel_." Wirt barely recognized it as Greg's voice underneath a haunting echo.

In identical high pitches, Dipper and Mabel screamed.


	5. Chapter 5

With a crash, the singin' salmon was flung to the floor. Mabel had pushed it over with a heave. "Evil fish!" she shouted at it, breathing heavily. "Evil!"

Dipper had reflexively pulled out his journal and was flipping through it, mumbling about categories. "How'd it know our _names_?"

"I told Stan to get rid of it!" Mabel wailed. "The folly of man!"

Wirt cautiously went over to the fish, crouching down beside it. It was still flopping up and down with a mechanical whir. "Greg, I-I don't think this is helping. If you give them a heart attack, we'll _all_ be ghosts. Get out of the fish."

Deliberately ignoring Wirt, the singin' salmon gave another screech. " _You can hear now_!"

"It's trying to communicate," Dipper said, watching warily from behind the counter. He turned a few pages in his book. "H, hey there. What do you want with us… singin'... salmon…?"

Greg's voice sounded otherworldly, which Wirt supposed it was. " _I… am a ghost!_ _And I'm here to haunt you! WooOOOoooo!"_

Wirt had to stop himself from snapping "Cut it out!" at his brother. He rubbed at his temples (well, his fingers went right through his head, but performing the gesture was soothing) and told himself he was a _good_ brother now and patience was a virtue.

"Wait, so you're _not_ the spirit of the singin' salmon itself, given sentience through your sheer force of hatred for the people who keep pushing your button over and over to make you sing?" Mabel said cautiously.

" _I'm the singin' ghost-in, spendin' all day toastin'."_

Dipper muttered to himself, "But what does that _mean_?" He started chewing on his pen again. "Why us?"

" _We're possessing a vessel!"_ Greg replied unhelpfully. His voice was still an eerie sound.

Dipper frowned, looking carefully at the fish's dead eyes, then grabbed the mounted salmon and put it back on the counter. "If this is one of Bill's tricks, then being in a human body was more traumatizing than I thought."

"More like being in _your_ body." Mabel poked him in the side and Dipper giggled, reflexively, then cleared his throat in embarrassment. "No, really," Mabel said. "Your body's actually traumatizing."

"It's not a picnic for me either," Dipper protested, then jabbed his finger on a section of his book, a page about ghosts. "Why us, though?" he asked the fish. "Do you need help moving on?"

" _Moving on where?"_

"Getting over, you know…" Dipper waved a hand, trying to find a tactful way to say it. "Your, uh. Death?" He cringed.

" _We didn't die_!" Greg answered cheerfully.

Dipper was about to break some very difficult news when Mabel spoke up. "You keep saying 'we.' Who's 'we'?"

" _Me and Wirt!"_

Dipper started flipping through pages again. He conversing with the singin' salmon as though it were normal now, a testament to how many weird creatures he'd gotten used to dealing with over the last couple months. "What's a wirt?"

" _Wirt's my brother who complains a lot and told me what a vessel was_ ," came the singin' salmon's reply.

"Oh!" Dipper and Mabel said in understanding. "That's as normal a name as any," Dipper said as Mabel agreed, "Absolutely, wouldn't have thought otherwise."

"Is it just the two of you?" Dipper asked.

" _And Chief Commissioner Jason Funderburker_."

Wirt locked eyes with the ghostly frog, who looked as confused as Wirt felt. "Greg, they don't know what any of that means. Just tell him he's our pet frog."

" _Who is a frog_ ," Greg added.

Dipper stopped chewing on his pen and had started scribbling notes on a piece of scrap paper, presumably for a later entry in his book. _Claims to be a ghost haunting the singin' salmon. In denial of death. Says a brother and a constable (?) (frenchman?) is with him._ "Why are you haunting us two though?"

"Yeah," Mabel said with a pout. "I've got plans with the girls tonight! Plans that don't involve getting haunted for all eternity!"

" _Because that's what ghosts do! Boo!"_

"Oh, geez, Greg. Get out of that thing," Wirt said with a chuckle. "Let me talk to them."

" _Get your own fish!"_

Dipper kept writing notes as the salmon spoke. _Requires fish offerings._ "All right, then what?"

"C'mon, it's my turn." Wirt sidled up to the mounted fish, experimentally trying to stick his hand in. It just phased through like everything else he tried to touch.

" _No! You got to pick the tv channel!"_

"I didn't! That was Mabel!" Wirt argued.

"I got to pick the what?" Dipper asked.

" _Well, you picked the road that got us to Gravity Falls."_

"Because you asked me to!" Wirt stopped himself. "Ugh… All right. You keep the fish. Just, just ask them for help please? They might know how to get us physical again, remember?"

"You were on the bus with us?" Mabel asked, trying to parse out the singin' salmon's words.

" _Uh-huh,_ " Greg answered absently. " _So can you help us?"_

Dipper bit the inside of his cheek. "I can try getting some anointed water…? The Journal doesn't usually talk about helping ghosts. Just, y'know, busting them."

" _But you got back_!"

The twins jumped at a noise behind them and whirled around as a door slammed open. "Ugh! Dipper, one of the kids on the last tour tried to taste the pickled brain and the results ain't pretty. Get in there with a mop, would ya?" Mr. Mystery straightened out his lapels with a grimace.

"Grunkle Stan!" Dipper and Mabel said in unison. Dipper grabbed for the salmon and hid it behind his back nervously.

"Well? Hop to," Stan said. "What're you doin' out here past closing, anyway?"

"Just, uh," Dipper said, trying to stall. Mabel hemmed and hawed beside him.

Greg decided to pitch in. " _Hi, Grunkle Stan_!" the singin' salmon said with a creak.

Dipper fumbled with it, dropping the mounted fish on the floor. "Gah…!"

Stan did a quick headcount and double-checked it against the number of great-nephews and nieces he knew of. Yep, one extra. "Who's grunkle am I now?" He reached around Dipper, grabbing the fish. "Shoot, where's its sunglasses?"

" _Help us, Grunkle Stan!_ " the singin' salmon answered cheerfully.

"Greg!" Wirt whispered frantically. He didn't want to get more people involved, especially not such a distinguished-seeming man as Mr. Mystery. "Time to stop doing what you're doing!"

Stan gave the fish a look, then sent the same look to Dipper and Mabel. He pinched the bridge of his nose. "This is more spookum scarums that a responsible adult should help you with, right?"

Dipper and Mabel nodded in tandem.

"Right. Well…" Stan seemed to be at a loss for words. He set the fish down. "Make sure that floor's clean before you go on any weird adventures." He nodded to himself, adult duty completed, then opened the cash register with a _ding!_ and started counting bills.

" _I'm supposed to go now,_ " the singin' salmon announced. " _Help us, Dipper and Mabel! I'm the singin' salmon, spendin' all day jammin'!_ " The fish wriggled, then convulsed, and finally seemed to die against its board as the song died down.

Wirt watched incredulously as Greg appeared, climbing out of the singin' salmon as easily as if it were a tube in a playground. "Good job, Greg," he said. "You've scarred an entire family for life. They may never eat salmon again." Dipper and Mabel had absconded to another room as soon as the singin' salmon died, presumably to study ghost banishing techniques.

"Thanks!" Greg said. "Did you hear? I asked for help!"

"You absolutely did ask them for help. You did do that."

"I don't think Dipper knows what to do, though."

"Yeah," Wirt admitted. "I wish I could have asked him what he did to get out of the mindscape. But maybe it wouldn't have worked for us after all. Our situations must be really different."

"He's getting us some fancy water though!" Greg reminded him.

"I think that's just to get us out of his house. C'mon." Wirt drifted toward a vending machine, feet scuffing through a rug. "Maybe I can… sidekick while you keep detecting things."

"Okay!" Greg chirped. "Gravity Falls is the mystery town! Even if Dipper can't, I'm sure there's someone who can help us!"

"SOMEONE, HUH?"

The unfamiliar voice nearly scared Wirt out of his skin.

Greg turned his head, looking for the source. "Yeah! Someone else might know about ghosts and mindscape stuff!"

Wirt was wildly searching the room, finally looking at his feet. The rug there had an elaborately embroidered Eye of Providence. When it noticed him watching, the eye gave a quick sultry wink (or was it a blink?). Like a wave spreading out from around the eye, ripples of desaturation surrounded its pupil, drowning the whole room in greyscale. Wirt squeaked.

"KIDS," said the voice, and the triangle peeled itself up from the rug and popped up in front of Greg and Wirt's eyes: A glowing yellow equilateral triangle decked out in a top hat and bow tie. It had arms that it grew spontaneously for the sake of spreading them out dramatically.

Greg and Wirt both turned to each other. "Bill!" Greg said with a huge grin.

"Bill," Wirt repeated in disbelief. He tried to maneuver himself in front of Greg protectively.

The triangle seemed not to notice. "KIDS," its grating voice crowed to them again. "HAVE I GOT A **DEAL** FOR **YOU**!"


	6. Chapter 6

"No way, no how," Wirt said grimly. No more deals. His arms were still extended as though Bill were poised to attack his little brother. "Spirits, with the mindscape, and ominous, corkboard conspiracies, with creepy deals? No, no way, nope. This town is cursed or something, let's just get out of here," he said to Greg.

"DON'T KNOW WHO'S BEEN FILLING YOU IN SO FAR, BUCKO, BUT THAT INFO SEEMS PRETTY FRAGMENTED!" Bill shattered, his pyramidal form disintegrating into golden bricks before the pieces slammed themselves back together. "KINDA LIKE YOUR SENTENCES! YOU THERE, SHORT STUFF!" A huge thin microphone appeared in Bill's hand, which he extended to Greg like an interviewer on television. "YOU SEEM LIKE THE BRIGHTER BROTHER. WHAT D'YOU THINK?"

"It's deal-maker Bill!" Greg said eagerly into the mic, though he was talking to Wirt. "Who made a deal and who's a triangle and he's Bill!"

Wirt turned a little, trying to keep an eye on the shapeshifting newcomer. "No, don't talk to this guy. Didn't you hear what Dipper and Mabel said? He's bad news."

"SURE, PARANORMAL EXPERTS, THOSE TWO ARE. THEY SO HAPPEN TO BE THE FIRST PEOPLE YOU SEE IN GRAVITY FALLS, BUT WHO _SAYS_ NOT TO TRUST YOUR IMMORTAL MENTAL FORMS TO TWO TWELVE-YEAR-OLDS WHO AREN'T EVEN TRYING TO HELP YOU?" Bill gave an exaggerated shrug, accompanied with an eyeroll.

"Look, we've got a handle on things here-" Wirt argued.

"YOU DO!" Bill agreed. "LOVED THAT PERFORMANCE BY THE WAY, GREG!" A small army of hands surrounded the three of them, applauding. One of the hands tore off a glove and threw it at Greg's feet in swooning admiration. "THAT SINGIN' SALMON? GENIUS! YOU CAN'T WRITE THIS STUFF! UNLESS YOU'RE SOME KINDA WEIRDO WITH BAD TASTE AND NO LIFE, I MEAN."

"Thank you!" Greg offered a few bows to his sudden audience, delighted. "How are you doing all this?"

The expression Wirt offered Bill could have melted steel beams. "And how do you know his _name_?!"

The clapping audience disappeared. "OHOHOH, YOU HAVE NO _IDEA_ WHO I REALLY AM, DO YA? YOU THINK I'M LOOKING FOR A FAUST FOR MY EVIL PLANS," he said to Wirt, then added to Greg, "AND YOU THINK I'M A DEVILISHLY DEBONAIR MYSTERY WITH GOOD TASTE IN ENTERTAINMENT! BUT I'M SO MUCH MORE THAN THAT," Bill continued, his size expanding. The image of a swirling galaxy appeared in place of the bow tie he wore. It flashed as he spoke, scanning through dozens of images so quickly that Wirt couldn't process them all. He recognized Dipper in one of them for a half-second. "I'M THE ALL-KNOWING, ALL-POWERFUL **MASTER OF THE MIND**!" And the images disappeared as Bill shrunk down to become a tiny hovering triangle, not two feet tall. "Bill Cipher, NICE to MEETCHA."

"Greg," Wirt said quietly. "Don't engage with him, okay? Let's turn around and walk away." No matter what Bill said, Wirt wasn't about to believe a word of it-or do anything but try to ignore the creature. After all, Wirt had read Bill's plans for his "grand finale" after possessing Dipper's body. Greg hadn't.

"YEAH, LISTEN TO THE STUFFY TYPE AND DON'T ENCOURAGE ME!" Bill told Greg. Greg giggled, having been told the same thing often (and never quite knowing why being encouraged was bad). "GUESS YOU GOTTA GO NOW, HUH? TRUCK RIGHT ON OUT OF GRAVITY FALLS AND KEEP WANDERING AROUND IN THE WOODS FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIVES. AND LONGER!"

Wirt took a breath to steady himself (a symbolic move if anything) and shook his head at Greg to discourage him from responding.

Greg gaped up at Bill. "What do you mean?"

Bill examined his fingertips-they were black with no nails, but otherwise Wirt would have thought he was checking out a manicure. "JUST SAYIN'! THE AIR IN GRAVITY FALLS IS GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH! EH, NOT MOST PEOPLE'S, BUT DEFINITELY YOURS!" His eye flitted to meet Wirts', though his body didn't move. "TAKE IT FROM A GUY WHO KNOWS THINGS. THIS BACKWATER TOWN IS YOUR LAST STOP. YOU GET OFF HERE OR YOU DON'T GET OFF AT ALL! OR, HEY, LEMME PUT IT IN TERMS YOU'LL UNDERSTAND, WIRT, OL' PAL!" Wirt looked unnerved at the use of his name, but Bill continued. "YOU'RE PAUSING AT THE HOUSE THAT SEEMS A SWELLING OF THE GROUND! THE FLY'S A-BUZZING! YOUR CLOCK'S STOPPING! AY, THERE'S THE RUB! YOU DIGGING MY LINGO HERE?"

"You don't know what you're talking about," Wirt eventually said as Bill prodded him. Literally, prodded him with a cane that sprung up out of nowhere. It wasn't until Wirt winced and tried to rub the shoulder he was getting jabbed in, then saw his hand phase right through, that he realized he shouldn't be able to feel or touch _anything_.

"WELL, I MAY JUST BE A HUMBLE SMALL-TOWN ALL-SEEING ALL-KNOWING EYE," Bill said. "BUT EVEN I KNOW THAT MEATBAG MEDICINE HAS ITS LIMITS. AND SO DOES YOUR INSURANCE!"

Greg looked troubled for the first time in the conversation. "What's he mean, Wirt?"

Wirt grimaced. That wasn't a conversation he was willing to have with Greg now or ever. "It's nothing. Just nonsense." Wirt was the elder child. He was supposed to protect Greg. This wasn't stuff a kid should have to think about.

"KEEP YOUR BROTHER IN THE DARK THEN." Bill twirled his cane. "I BET THAT'S WORKED OUT BEFORE! BUT HEY, I'M NOT THE ONE WHOSE TIME'S RUNNING OUT. NEXT TIME YOU'RE DESPERATE ENOUGH TO GET SOME **REAL** HELP, WE CAN TALK."

Greg looked between the two of them, deciding that it sounded like Bill was leaving. Probably because Wirt was being so rude to him. "How do we call you? We don't have a phone!"

"THAT'S EASY, KID! JUST SAY YOU WANNA CHAT. BECAUSE WHETHER YOU CAN SEE ME OR NOT…" Bill's eye stretched out to encompass his whole body, quickly overtaking it until it filled the room. "I'M ALWAYS WATCHING." The eye popped down to its standard size. "ANYWAY, KEEP IN MIND! YOU'RE NOT LOST YET! RQOB QHUGV ZDVWH WLPH RQ FRGHV KLGGHQ LQ IDQILF! AND PUPPETS ARE A DIME A DOZEN!" The last sentences came out so jumbled that Wirt wasn't even sure they were all English.

With a flash of light, the room flooded with color again. Stan was gone from the gift shop. Nothing was in there but a buzzing vending machine, a napping pig, and the two ghosts.

Wirt looked down at the rug by his feet and recoiled. But Greg was bouncing up and down in the air excitedly. "So when are we gonna ask Bill for help? Can we ask now?"

"Never. We're never asking Bill for anything." Wirt made a face. "He's a bad guy, Greg. Think of him like… like the Beast. They're the same sort of malicious... creatures of darkness and mystery. Hidden and lurking, always waiting for a chance to spring their traps to capture the innocent. Looming behind you like the inevitability of..." Wirt trailed off.

"Oh," said Greg, pretending to understand. He usually played along with Wirt to make him feel better whenever Wirt started talking in poetry. "That's neat."

"It's _not_ -look, can you just promise me you won't talk to Bill again?" When he saw the reluctance on Greg's face, Wirt relented. "Without me _there_ , at least?"

Greg let out a heavy sigh that was too big for his body. "Was Bill right, though?"

"No. He wasn't," Wirt said firmly, then thought better of it as he questioned himself. "A, about what, exactly?"

"That we can't leave Gravity Falls." Greg was disappointed. He'd had more fun so far here, being a scary fish ghost and meeting a fun yelling yellow man, then he had in a long time.

"He can't tell us what to do. Bill wasn't telling the truth." Wirt wrung his hands. They twisted into each other, incorporeal, as Wirt fretted over the possibility that Bill knew exactly as much as he claimed to know. "But, maybe… maybe we shouldn't leave Gravity Falls just yet."

Greg beamed. "Just in case?"

"Yeah," Wirt said, defeated. "Just in case..."


	7. Chapter 7

"Anointed water," Dipper said as he paced back and forth in the living room. Mabel watched him from the chair. "It's supposed to banish category-ones in a snap. I should be able to get some by the end of the day."

Mabel kicked her legs idly, brushing the soles of her shoes against the carpet. She was unwittingly seated beside Greg's ghost, who was eavesdropping again with his big brother. "Do we really have to banish them right away?"

"We don't need another displaced spirit in the Shack, much less _three_ of them," Dipper said, stopping for a second. "We've already got _Bill_ possibly watching our every move, that one fairy you caught the other day, and I'm pretty sure we've got an old guy somewhere in our vents." The twins looked upwards.

Above their heads, a soft thumping sounded and Larry King's distant voice called, " _So you're an invisible wizard! Let's talk about that."_

"And the invisible wizard," Mabel added.

Dipper waved a hand. "Yeah, sure, whatever. Anyway, we don't need three more spirits crowding up the joint."

"Still seems kinda harsh." Mabel tapped her chin. "Even if they were stalking us all summer, I guess?"

"Oh, right. What exactly was the singin' salmon saying about the road to Gravity Falls?" Dipper resumed pacing. "The way it was talking, it's almost like it originated outside the city. Like it died somewhere else. But then why would it come _here_?"

"Why does anything weird come to Gravity Falls?" Mabel asked rhetorically with a shrug, then smiled. "Like you!"

"You came with me too so _hah_ ," Dipper shot back.

"I'm the fun kind of weird, so double-hah."

After a beat, Dipper asked, "You don't think they're in here now, do you?"

Wirt and Greg looked at each other. They weren't used to people knowing about their presence.

Mabel said, "It's not like there's any way to _know_." She craned her neck to the side, checking the clock.

"The ghost showed up once already. I'm sure it could possess a vessel again. Maybe tell us about its unfinished business? And we could finish the business for it so it'd go to the afterlife? I'm mostly working off tv ghost plots here," Dipper said, unsure.

"Yeah, but my thing with Candy and Grenda," Mabel reminded. "It's starting soon."

"Right, right," Dipper said. "I mean, we could do it another night. It's not like there's a hurry. The singin' salmon spirit didn't seem to be malicious, exactly."

Mabel smiled brightly-at first. Then the smile faded and a look of guilt set in instead. "You need me to help?"

Dipper shook his head. "I guess you don't have to. But it seems like a good idea, y'know? I'd rather have you here for backup."

"I'll cancel with the girls," Mabel said, sounding defeated and trotting over to the phone.

"You don't have to!" Dipper reminded, but his true focus was on the journal as he scanned it for last-minute tips.

"It sounds like they're gonna summon you or something," Wirt told Greg once the room fell silent.

"Yeah! I'm gonna haunt them!" Greg answered. "While you look for clues!"

"I thiiink we've exhausted the clue supply."

Greg shook his head stubbornly. "I'll distract them while you and Commissioner Funderburker find something vital for the case. That's the plan!"

Wirt tried to protest but he couldn't think of a worthwhile counter-plan to suggest, so he sighed dramatically and waved at the frog. "Fine. Don't leave the Shack, okay? I don't like losing sight of you."

As spirits, if Greg wandered off and Wirt didn't find him soon enough, would that condemn Wirt to an eternity searching the earth for his lost brother? What would be the chances of a single spirit finding another over the span of the globe's four corners, from the hidden depths of the oceans to the highest reach of the atmosphere? After all, Wirt and Greg could hover. They'd been able to get to the top of the muffin-graffiti'd water tower. Just how high could they go? Would Greg ever decide to explore the cosmos? How many eons of dark nothingness would they have to travel before finding another solid mass in space? How many infinities would it take for Wirt to find Greg if Greg decided to float all the way above the stratosphere? Or, potentially worse, how long could one of them spend in darkness if, while walking through objects, they sunk down below the surface of the Earth's crust and went to the untouchable core of the planet? Would they even be able to see or hear each other at that point?

Wirt fretted over these questions as he obediently gestured to Jason Funderburker and led him upstairs to Dipper and Mabel's room again. He passed Mabel, who had gone up at some point and was returning with a toy bear in her arms.

"He needs to possess a vessel, right?" she called down to Dipper.

" _Please_ not the sock puppets again," Dipper groaned.

"Nope!" she said, hopping down the last stair and presenting her prize.

Dipper shrieked in horror, falling out of his seat and scrambling away. "Oh no, please, no, anything but Bea-"

" _They're quite a pair, Mabel and Bear-o!_ " Mabel belted out, somewhat in tune. " _Her un-bear-lievable bear!_ "

"Nope! Nope! No Bear-o! We all hate Bear-o!" He snatched the toy out of Mabel's arms and tossed it behind him. "No self-respecting spirit is going to possess something like Bear-o, and even if it did-"

Greg saw his chance. Without thinking, he dove forward into the bedraggled bear puppet, which glowed blue for a moment as it was possessed.

" _Her un-bear-lievable bear!_ " Greg sang a quick reprise. His voice lacked the mechanical squeaks, tinny quality, and grinding gears of the singin' salmon, since his vessel wasn't a robot fish. It sounded more childlike, though still eerily echoing, through Bear-o's mouth.

"Not doing this, no." Dipper threw his hands up. "We are _not_ having a conversation through the veil of life and death with your creepy puppet bear."

"Fine, spoilsport." Mabel stuck out her tongue at Dipper. "I'll go get a sock puppet. Hey! Bear-o!" she said, craning her head around Dipper.

The puppet moved to stare at her.

"Would you rather be Puppet-Me, Puppet-Stan, Puppet-Dipper-"

"It's not possessing puppet-me," Dipper interjected.

"Puppet-mayor, puppet-Gabe, ooh, that'd be weird-"

Greg interrupted. " _I want to be puppet mayor! Mayor of all puppets! Who's also a ghost!"_

"Okay! I'll be right back. The mayor puppet's in the attic, though it's kinda, uh, sorta really burnt from those big finale explosives." Mabel wagged a finger. "You two play nice while I'm up there."

" _I'll behave. I'll say boo only a couple times_ ," Bear-O agreed in Greg's voice. " _Oh no! Did that count for one of them?"_

"Mabel," Dipper said in a strained voice. "Talking Bear-O is ten times creepier than regular Bear-O, get him out of it _now_ please."

As Mabel popped back upstairs to grab a new puppet, Wirt was exploring new areas of the twin's room he hadn't seen. For example, there was a closet he walked into, observing the boxes stacked everywhere and the jars of eyes, bags of teeth, and taxidermy samples that Wirt assumed for his own mental well-being were fakes, being stored here due to lack of space in the tourable part of the Shack.

But Wirt went back to peering under beds and through windows, giving the triangular window a suspicious squint, before he noticed the Mabel puppet on a bedpost. He'd seen it before, but now that he knew puppets were considered a body he could possess, he was curious. Greg seemed to slip into the singin' salmon so easily. Would Wirt be able to do the same?

Experimentally, Wirt reached over to touch the sock. It was solid to the touch! Well, as solid as soft fabric could be. His hands didn't turn incorporeal and slip through the sock like he had come to expect.

"Weird," he said to himself, putting the puppet on his hand. "Could someone hear me when I talk, now?"

He didn't sound any different to himself. Hm. Wirt flapped his hand open and closed a few times and said aloud, "What about now?"

This time, his voice had a more solid quality. It was easy to miss, but it sounded louder, more present in the room, like Wirt's voice itself were plugged into a very quiet amp. "Neat," he decided as he flapped the puppet's mouth. "I guess if I do this, then I could talk to Dipper and Mabel too."

"Wait, what?" said a voice from behind him.

Wirt whirled around, almost dropping the sock puppet. Mabel stood behind him, an armful of puppets crammed into a huge cardboard box that she struggled to carry. "Oh, uhm, hi, that is, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be snooping, but Greg told me to, and-" The girl was staring at the sock puppet dangling in Wirt's hand. Or, from Mabel's perspective, she stared at her sock doppelganger silently hover in midair.

Wirt slapped his hand through his face. Of course. He adjusted the sock puppet on his hand and started moving its mouth. "Sorry about that, Mabel." Wirt's voice came out loud and clear.

Mabel dropped her puppet box on the floor.


	8. Chapter 8

Dipper looked over at Bear-o.

Looked away.

Looked back.

"So…" he said eventually, trying to break the awkward silence, but he was interrupted as Bear-o shouted "BOO!" and started giggling. Dipper jumped in honest surprise (and some real fear) and then glared at the thing. "Mabel, you better get down here with a new puppet fast," he muttered. But Dipper dug around in a vest pocket, pulling out a camcorder and setting it up. "All right. Dipper's Guide to the Unexplained," he said to the camera. He pulled a piece of cardboard out from under Stan's chair, scribbling on it and holding it in front of the lens. "Anomaly number one hundred seventeen: the possessor." He read off the sign before tossing it behind him. "Earlier as Mabel and I were working in the Mystery Shack gift shop, one of the attractions began talking to us."

" _That was me!_ " said Bear-o.

Dipper turned the camera to his face for a reaction shot of his own grimace, then focused it on the talking puppet. "It appears to be able to possess different vessels at will, and right now it's decided to take on the form of my sister's traumatizing bear puppet. I am now attempting to make contact with it." He cleared his throat. "Oh, ancient possessor," he started grandiosely.

" _I'm not Possessor!_ " Bear-o said, waving its arms. Some of its stuffing fell out of a ripped seam.

"Oh, uh, yeah, all right," Dipper stammered. He was trying to salvage _any_ dignity possible out of this situation, but Bear-o was making it difficult. "What is your, um, true name, ghost?"

" _My name's Greg! Like 'egg' but with a 'grr._ '" Bear-o made a growling noise for emphasis.

Dipper lowered the camera, pinching the bridge of his nose and saying, "Yeah, of course the ancient spirit's name is Greg, what else would it be." Then he added for the camera's sake, "Greg here told us that he is merely one of three spirits haunting the Mystery Shack, the others being a police commissioner named Funderburker and his brother named Wirt. Where are those two right now, Greg?" He focused the camera on Bear-o.

" _They're in Gravity Falls_!" Bear-o said eagerly. " _Cuz we got here by walking and I saw a woodpecker, and then I fell off a sign, but I didn't get hurt because I'm a ghost, and then we met a bear with a bunch of heads but I think he saw us so we had to leave."_

Dipper set the camera down, though it kept recording. "Wait, wait. You met the multi-bear?" he said. "Gosh, I need to pay that guy a visit. It's been, like, a month. Did he seem like he was doing okay?"

Bear-o shrugged. " _I should visit too! I'm a bear now so we must be cousins."_ His paw stroked his chin. " _Like Bill and Jerome."_

Dipper tilted his head. "...Huh?"

" _I have this hypothesis_ ," Bear-o said the word carefully, like it wasn't one he was used to using. " _That Bill is secretly Jerome's cousin. Since Wirt said they're both delicious creatures of darkness from Missouri."_

"Hold up, go back," Dipper urged. "Did you say Bill? Like _Bill Cipher_ Bill?"

" _Yup_!" Bear-o chirped. " _He's really good at puppet budgets_."

Dipper ran a hand through his hair, pushing the brim of his hat up. "He's _talked_ to you?!"

" _He can talk to you too if you want! Because he's always here_." The puppet's frozen smile bored into Dipper. " _He's listening right now! To everything we're saying! All the time!_ "

Dipper sat silently, petrified.

Then he picked Bear-o up and hurled it across the room.

* * *

"Did you follow me upstairs?" Mabel said accusingly to the sock puppet hovering in front of her.

" _What? No, I._ _I was already up here,"_ Wirt defended. " _I mean, I wasn't_ sneaking around _or anything, hahah, or like, invading your privacy by systematically going through your personal items in a desperate attempt at finding clues for an ill-defined mystery that doesn't exist, or… anything crazy like that._ "

"You sound different-y," Mabel said with pursed lips. "Wait a second. Are you even the same-" she started to ask just as Wirt interrupted by saying, " _No, I'm not the same guy-_ "

Wirt stammered an apology (" _wait, no, you, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt_ ") as Mabel said, "Oh wait, no, no, you go ahead," and the two of them shared a polite laugh.

" _You already met my brother Greg_ ," Wirt said. " _He told you my name, right?_ "

"Oh, so _you're_ the famous Wirt." Mabel sounded tickled pink. She flopped herself back on her bed, bouncing as she got comfy. "Where's the commissioner?"

" _He's right here_ ," Wirt said. The Mabel sock puppet mimed glancing around. " _He can't really talk, though? He's a frog. If he possessed something, all it could do is croak_."

"Ghost pun!" Mabel said appreciatively. "It's just the three of you, right? You don't have a secret army of ancient ghosts who're gonna descend on all my puppets?" She paused, imagining the scene. "...We could have a _puppet party_!"

" _No! It's just us three_ ," Wirt said. And then he added, " _You keep saying that, but we're not ancient or anything, okay? I'm in high school_ _and_ _Greg's barely in grade school_."

Mabel's eyebrows creased together. "That's so _sad_." But she seemingly forgot her grief right away. "Wait! Wait. I saw this movie. How long have you been in high school?" Her voice got breathy and dramatic for the question.

Wirt's puppet looked at her. " _A while?_ " he said, not sure what she was referencing.

"I know what you are."

" _You do?_ "

"Agh!" Mabel flopped backwards on her bed, covering her face with a pillow. Her voice came out muffled. "That wasn't the right line at all!" She clung to the pillow before rolling onto her stomach, staring at the puppet. "You didn't actually look like puppet-me when you were alive, did you?"

" _Uh. No. I'm just an average high schooler? I'm kinda, short, I guess. Brown hair. Big, uh, big ears._ " Not that he'd seen himself in a mirror any time recently.

Mabel perked up. "Really? You have a nice voice."

" _I, uh, ah, eh, wah_?" Wirt stammered some nonsense syllables, searching for the proper response.

Mabel flashed her braces at the puppet. "I bet you're _really_ cute!"

" _Ha, eh, wha?!_ "

"Did I ever introduce myself properly? I'm Mabel. Rhymes with fable. As in, fairy tale, like a princess! Funny how names work, huh?" She draped herself across her bed with a hand cupping her chin, accidentally sliding down the covers onto the floor. She kept the pose as she fell. "Like how Wirt rhymes with dirt, which is where flowers grow. Flowers? Princesses? _Fairy tale weddings_? Whaaat? We go together so _well_!"

Wirt watched the bizarre scene in disbelief. " _I'm already in lo-in-I-you're_ twelve _!"_ he said, flabbergasted.

"And you're dead! But you know," Mabel pulled herself to her feet and pointed at her face as she gave an exaggerated wink and whispered intensely, " _We can make it work!"_

" _I'm not dead!"_ is what Wirt chose for the topic of conversation. " _Look, don't tell Greg all this, but we're not really ghosts. Our bodies are alive. They just won't… let us in, for some reason. And we need your help figuring out why!"_

Mabel still wore a goofy smile that she considered her "flirting face." " _Re_ -ally! And why can _I_ help?"

" _Because you said the same thing happened to Dipper!"_ Wirt exclaimed. " _But he got back in his body after Bill stole it. So you two know how to... "_

Mabel's shoulders slumped. "This is about _that_? Eck." She sucked air in through her teeth, then stooped to rummage through the box she'd dropped. "If you want to talk about how _Bill_ works, Dipper's the one to ask." She pulled out a mayor puppet, the one she'd originally come upstairs to find. "He's still downstairs. Alone with your brother and my-" She gasped, realizing her tactical error too late.

She'd been upstairs for so long, and Dipper was still making conversation with a possessed puppet that Dipper _wrongfully_ thought was demonic enough on its own. Who knew what Dipper had done to her beloved toy by now?

"Bear-o!" Mabel cried, grabbing the two puppets and charging downstairs with them. Wirt found himself in the uncomfortable position of being dragged by his hand down a flight of stairs. Since he was incorporeal, he didn't get bruised by them, but _still_. "I'm coming to save you!"


	9. Chapter 9

Mabel clattered her way downstairs, the Mabel puppet clutched in one hand and the mayor puppet in the other. "Dipper! No! I'll never forgive you!" she cried out, stumbling and skidding to a stop.

"What?! I didn't do anything!" Dipper said frantically, stuffing the video evidence in a pocket of his vest.

"Then where's Bear-o?!"

Dipper's eyes hardened. "Somewhere he _can't come back from_."

Wirt twisted his arm around in Mabel's grip. The sensation of interacting with the physical world was throwing him off. He glanced around the room. " _Greg?_ " he called out nervously. Dipper's tone of voice was scaring him.

" _Knock knock knock!"_ came Greg's voice, though it was muffled.

Dipper looked furtively at the easy chair, then back at Mabel. Firmly, he said, "Ignore that."

But Mabel was already scurrying to the chair, stretching her arm underneath and digging around. "Bear-o!" she exclaimed, pulling out the puppet. It seemed unharmed except for some new dust bunnies tangled in its ratty fur. "I can't believe you, Dipper! Trying to hide the body from your own sister! You know our policy on that!"

"It's a monster!" Dipper tried to justify himself. "Look, it's working with Bill, it said so!" He glared at Bear-o. "Tell her what you told me!"

Bear-o's mouth was still a stiff rubber grin. "' _Who is there?' asked the bear_ ," Greg recited through the puppet mouth. " _But no one was there_."

"See! See!" Dipper waved his arms wildly. "You can't tell me that's not creepy to you!"

Mabel groaned. "It's just a little kid saying fun nonsense!"

Dipper dropped his arms. "What? No, it's-"

"It's a _kid_ ," she insisted. "He's not even in middle school yet. He's probably just reading you a poem!"

" _I found it in Wirt's papers!"_ Bear-o agreed. " _He's a poet and I didn't even know it. He wrote a really scary poem about bears, and one about bananas!"_

" _What?!_ " Wirt squawked. The Mabel puppet twisted to face Bear-o. " _How did you even find those?"_

" _You left 'em out by your tape recorder._ "

Mabel shook her puppet for emphasis, shaking Wirt in the process, who made a " _ah-uh-ah-uh-ah"_ noise as he was jostled. "I told you!" she said to Dipper. "He's just a cute kid! Possessing a cute bear! That's double the cuteness! Or is it cuteness squared?"

"Nope, nuh-uh," Dipper said with crossed arms. "Not how math works. And why is _your_ puppet talking?"

Mabel gasped. "Right! I need to tell you! While I was upstairs, I just so happened to meet a real _dreamboat_."

Dipper groaned as soon as Mabel's voice took on a sing-song quality. "Mabel! It's been like a day since Gabe happened! You really wanna go down that route?" He looked at the puppet in her hand meaningfully. "You want to wind up like _Gabe_?"

" _What happened to Gabe?"_ Wirt asked weakly.

"It's not important," Mabel said as Dipper answered, "Puppet kisser." The siblings frowned at each other.

"This is different," Mabel continued. "Beneath this artfully crafted sock-and-glue exterior is the heart of a real _hunk_." She nudged Dipper's side. "He's in high school," she said conspiratorially, as though that automatically qualified Wirt as being handsome and charming.

"He's in high school?!" Dipper repeated at a higher volume and pitch. "Look, I don't care how dead you are, you are too old for her, man!" he directed at the Mabel sock puppet.

"Be polite!" she retorted. "Sorry about Dipper. You know how brothers are," she added to Wirt. " _Over-protective_." Though she said the word goofily and added a fart noise with her tongue for emphasis.

" _I had_ nothing _to do with this,_ " Wirt protested to Dipper. " _I just met her! Though, I guess…_ " Wirt sighed. His puppet hung limply in Mabel's hand, though its mouth still flapped open and closed as he spoke. " _What is love, but a force that carries you off unwillingly? A riptide, assaulting an unwitting swimmer and dragging him to the depths in its unrelenting undertow. And though it be dark, and leave you stammering and straining for breath, it may yet carry you across the seas to a stranger shore, to a world of beautiful but ultimately unanswered questions… But who could carry a message to that Elysian beach from a violent wood, forever trapped in that seventh circle of infernal depth? To what end does love make us bleed?"_ Wirt finished with a flourish.

The other three watched the puppet's soliloquy silently. Dipper raised his eyebrows throughout it, as if telling Mabel, " _See? You picked another whackjob."_

" _And_ he's a romantic," Mabel eventually said cheerfully.

"None of that matters right now," Dipper said with a frown. "Greg here said something and we've gotta talk about it."

" _I need to talk to you first, though, Dipper,_ " Wirt interjected.

Mabel looked crestfallen. "We were talking about something important up there. It's stuff you should help with."

" _I wanna say stuff too!"_ said Bear-o. " _Cuz I gotta tell you about-"_

"First thing-"

"But before that-"

" _This one's urgent! We need to talk about-"_

The four kids' voices overlapped, but all at once they unexpectedly chorused together to say the words " _ **Bill Cipher**_!"

" _He's really fun! You don't have to be scared of him,_ " Bear-o insisted.

Dipper interrupted to say, "Greg is working with him! He was going on and on about how Bill's always watching us!"

Wirt spoke over him through Mabel's puppet. " _Don't listen to Greg; he doesn't know what he's talking about! We met Bill, and I don't know what he's trying but he wants to make a deal and honestly that's_ way _too close to home-"_

"You _met_ him?" Mabel said, surprised.

" _Don't_ make a deal with him!" Dipper said. "Whatever you do! He doesn't keep his word!"

Wirt shook his puppet "head." " _Yeah, I know, I saw that page in your notebook. I'm not messing with any of that, believe me."_

Dipper looked at the Mabel puppet, surprised. "You know the Journal?"

"What did he ask for?" Mabel said curiously.

" _He just wants to talk_ ," Bear-o said with a pout in his voice, if not on his puppet face.

" _He needs us to stay in Gravity Falls,"_ Wirt corrected. " _He said he was trying to help us, but, y'know. That's what they all say."_

"Help you…" Dipper repeated. He started to pace in a looping circle. "That's what the singin' salmon, I mean, _Greg_ was asking for earlier. What do you need help with, exactly?"

" _We need help making more friends in Gravity Falls!_ "

"No _, Greg,"_ Wirt said sharply. " _We need help getting back home. We're trying to do something that, well, I mean-you did it before, Dipper. You were a spirit like us when Bill possessed your body, right?_ "

"I wasn't a ghost, though," Dipper said. "I was a living person whose mental form was temporarily trapped in the mindscape."

Wirt winced, though it wasn't visible to Dipper or Mabel. " _I mean, like, you… You didn't have any ghost powers or whatever except for possessing stuff. And Mabel thought you might be dead when you were being possessed. It said so in the book."_

"It's different, and don't let Bill convince you otherwise," Dipper said. "When you're dead, you're dead."

"Unless you're a zombie," Mabel reminded him.

"Right," Dipper said agreeably. "Unless you're a zombie. But a zombie is the exact opposite of a ghost."

Wirt made an impatient noise. " _Look, can we-can we talk about this alone?_ "

" _I want to talk about it too!_ " Bear-o protested. " _I can handle it. I'm the leader, remember?_ "

" _We take turns being leader_ ," Wirt told him. He huffed, trying to think of a good enough excuse to get Greg to leave him alone with Dipper for a few minutes. Just long enough to discuss things he couldn't have Greg knowing. " _Besides, Mabel, Mabel wants you to…"_ He trailed off helplessly.

Mabel looked between the two puppets before smiling sympathetically. "I want to make a movie about Bear-o! I bet I can make bank off a video with a talking puppet. I'll look like a master ventriloquist!"

"Keep your voice down, or Stan'll add you two as a new attraction," Dipper muttered in warning. It didn't sound like he was joking.

" _I guess I can help with that_ ," Greg said reluctantly.

Mabel picked up Bear-o and twirled around with it. "Just you wait, kid! I'm gonna make you a star!" She trotted to the stairs, Dipper pulling the camcorder out of his pocket and handing it over as she bounced past. She tossed him the Mabel puppet in return. "Don't wait up, boys!"

Wirt jerked away from Dipper, the puppet still fitted on his hand so it appeared to Dipper to be hovering. Wirt rotated his wrist. It wasn't sore from his prolonged period in Mabel's grasp, but he _should_ have been sore, and that was reason enough to stretch.

"Yeah," Dipper said slowly. "What was so important we needed to talk about it alone? Because I swear, if you're another one of those creeps wanting to make Mabel their _queen_ like this is the freaking middle ages-"

" _No! No no no, I, uh, I, I don't have a girlfriend, exactly, but I, she's, her name, her name is Sara, and she's my age? Because I'm not a, no!"_

From the top of the stairs a voice shouted, "I'M ALREADY PLANNING OUR WEDDING! IT'S A FALL WEDDING AND IT'S GOT DAFFODILS AND IT'S GONNA BE LOVELY!"

"For crying out loud, Mabel!" Dipper said back before shouting. "STOP EAVESDROPPING, AND DAFFODILS DON'T BLOOM IN FALL!"

"KIDS!" Stan's voice came from deeper in the Shack. "KEEP IT DOWN OUT THERE! AND YELLOW CHRYSANTHEMUMS ARE YEAR-ROUND, GO WITH THOSE!"

"' _Slighted love' in flower language,"_ Wirt thought aloud. " _YELLOW CHRYSANTHEMUMS SOUND GREAT, MABEL!"_ he shouted upstairs.

"THAT SOUNDS BEAUTIFUL, THANKS, YOU GUYS!" she hollered. Mabel smiled at Bear-o. "What do you think, Greg?" she asked in her indoors voice.

Greg, surprisingly, didn't offer his opinion on the flowers. After all, unbeknownst to Mabel, he had left the Shack. No one else had noticed, except for the one person there who could hardly be called a "person" at all.

But _he_ , of course, noticed everything, especially when he had been so enthusiastically invited.


	10. Chapter 10

Dipper dug around in a drawer, tossing old candy wrappers, a crumpled dollar bill, and a napkin on the floor as he rummaged around for a pad of paper in lieu of recording the conversation. He pulled a pen out from one of his hidden pockets. "I wish I had another camera," he said absently, already putting together plans for how his interview with a ghost could go as he perched on the easy chair.

The Mabel puppet floated in front of him. Wirt was standing across from Dipper, unseen, his hand shifting inside the sock puppet uncomfortably. " _I don't know where to begin_ ," he admitted.

"You're not from Gravity Falls, right? Start there," Dipper told him, gesturing with the pen.

" _That's right. We, well, Greg and I grew up over in New England_ ," Wirt started. " _We didn't start travelling around until Halloween._ "

Dipper stopped him to clarify. "Which Halloween?"

" _The last Halloween_." But then Wirt rethought his answer. " _Wait, wait, I should probably check. What year is it?_ "

"Twenty-twelve. August of twenty-twelve."

" _Yeah, it was last Halloween. But if it's already August, then it's been almost a year?_ " Wirt sounded bewildered.

Dipper scribbled down the date. "Time flies when you don't have school or meals or sleep, huh?"

" _You don't know the half of it_."

"So it's Halloween. You two are out trick-or-treating?" Dipper asked casually.

" _No, we were gonna go meet some people I know at the graveyard_." That made Wirt sound a lot more social than he had been, but oh well. " _We kinda wound up running away from the cops_."

"Woah." Dipper looked at the sock puppet, sounding impressed. Wendy had taught him enough about teenagerdom that he assumed run-ins with the law were commonplace.

" _I'm not usually like that, I swear. But we, we, long story, but we conked our heads and fell into a lake_."

Dipper took notes. "And then, let me guess. You were outside of your body and floating around? Couldn't get back in the corpses?"

" _What? Ew! No! We were, I won't go into all this, but all of a sudden we were someplace else. I don't remember anything in between. Just that we found ourselves already lost in this other place_."

That got Dipper's attention. "Another realm. Some kind of afterlife! But no, no, any real afterlife, you wouldn't have been able to get back to this world," he corrected himself.

Wirt shook the puppet's head. " _The place was literally called the Unknown. We were there for a long time, but eventually I found a way to get us home. Like, it had been a riddle all along, but once I remembered how we got there, I was finally able to figure out the way back_." Wirt hadn't talked about this with anyone but Greg, for whom conversations about talking bluebirds and evil beasts were commonplace. " _You believe me about that? I mean, if it hadn't happened to me, I wouldn't believe it._ "

Dipper shrugged. "I've heard of weirder. Though nowhere in the Journal does it talk about any kind of life after death. Theoretically, a trans-dimensional portal of some kind could be possible, though. You could have just fallen into a rip in the space-time continuum."

" _When I got us home, we were still in the lake_ ," Wirt said softly. " _It had only been a few minutes, but our bodies didn't wake up. Not even after they fished us out."_

Dipper chewed on that thought. Normally, he might offer sympathy, but he was in supernatural-theory mode. He was considering Greg and Wirt as anomalies, not as people. "So the Unknown must be some kind of in-between state. You were able to return from it into the mindscape, but it wasn't a physically _real_ place that would affect your real-world bodies, and it operated on a different timeframe than this world. Could you see color in the Unknown?"

" _Color?"_ But Wirt remembered how Bill Cipher had sucked all the vivacity out of the gift shop earlier. " _Oh! Like how when we around Bill, everything was grayscale. No, it wasn't like that. The Unknown had all kinds of weird stuff, but nothing that obvious_."

"When you can see Bill, you're in the dreamscape," Dipper said offhandedly. "If you were alive, I'd say he could only really talk to you when you're sleeping or hallucinating."

" _I'm still alive_ ," came the impatient answer. " _And so is Greg._ "

"Not from what you just told me."

Wirt made a frustrated noise. " _After they got our bodies out of the lake, they took us to the hospital and hooked us up to some kind of machines that breathed for us and everything. You know how we're possessing vessels now, by floating into them and using them to move around? We tried that with our real bodies. It's like there was some kind of barrier. We couldn't get into them, but they were_ still alive. _As far as I know, they still are_. _We gave up on getting back in, until we heard you talking with Mabel about how you'd done the same thing! Your body was empty and you got back inside it! We need to know how, and we need to know it fast._ "

Dipper winced at the memory. "You're kinda overestimating me here, man. I made a deal with Bill and he pulled me out of my body. We tricked him into leaving it so it was empty again, and I just swooped in. It's completely different."

Wirt was quiet for a moment. " _But what's so different about it?_ "

Dipper hemmed and hawed. "I got forced out by Bill. I didn't almost almost die or whatever."

" _Is that such an important distinction when it comes to souls?_ " The question sounded rhetorical, but Wirt thought through it. " _However it happened, each of our souls got untethered from our bodies_. _You were able to enter yours again, but we weren't_. _Was your body, like, conscious when you went into it again?"_

Dipper made a noise in the negative. "I guess I was passed out. Or maybe asleep."

" _So just being unconscious, that's not the reason we couldn't get in our bodies_ ," Wirt pointed out.

"Maybe something else happened. How long were you underwater? I mean, maybe your hearts were still beating, but you were brain dead, or just got too much brain damage to-"

" _I keep telling you, we're not dead!_ " Wirt interrupted, upset. " _We followed our bodies to the hospital, I heard the doctors; they were expecting us to wake up any minute. And besides, I'd_ know _if I was dead_."

"You'd know, huh," Dipper repeated skeptically. "Do you have any idea how many ghosts don't realize they died?"

" _I don't care. We're still flesh and blood, just like you_. _When we're walking around like this, like spirits, there's part of us missing and it's still out there_."

"Greg already admitted that he's a ghost."

A draft shifted a dollar bill on the floor as Dipper spoke. The pyramid printed on it stared forward.

" _Greg doesn't know this stuff!_ " Wirt threw up his hands, the Mabel sock puppet floating higher in the air. " _I'm his big brother. It's my job to keep him safe, and that absolutely includes keeping him from worrying about the inevitability of death! Don't you tell him I said any of this, either. He's having fun roaming around the country without knowing anything and until I can fix this mess myself, it's gonna stay that way._ "

"I'm not gonna say anything!" Dipper said.

" _Good_." Wirt's shoulders slumped as the fight went out of him. " _I, I'm sorry, I'm just scared for him. I already messed up in a big way in the Unknown and I almost lost Greg for good_. _This is the only way I can protect him._ "

"Hey, siblings mess up. Mabel and I, we let each other down all the time," Dipper said, a sympathetic smile pulling at his lips. "Bill tried to use that against us. But no matter how selfish you think you were, or how you weren't there when they needed you, it's never gonna be the end of the world."

" _I guess_ ," Wirt said eventually. " _Thanks. I was hanging all our hopes on you, but if you don't know how to fix things for us, I'll understand. We've really messed up your day, haven't we?_ "

"It's cool," Dipper said, propping his elbows behind his head. "Paranormal stuff like this happens to us on the regular. I'm just glad you haven't tried to kill us yet. I'll read up on ghosts, or, hm, astral projection, I guess? We'll figure out something to help you. No promises or anything."

" _Thanks_." Wirt grimaced. " _Though the whole thing may be a moot point soon_."

"Yeah? Why?"

" _It's nothing. It's nothing, just, something Bill said, and I know we can't trust him, but he knew stuff I hadn't told anybody, and I won't, and definitely don't tell Greg, okay-_ "

"Spit it out, dude."

Wirt swallowed. " _Our insurance. He said it was running out along with our time_."

Dipper looked at the puppet blankly. "Oh no?"

" _We're hooked up to machines keeping us alive! In a hospital! That we checked into a_ year _ago_!" It looked ridiculous for the Mabel puppet to be talking so frantically, bobbing from side to side. " _If our insurance is out and our parents can't afford it, if they're not sure we're even gonna wake up after so long-_ "

"They're pulling your plug," Dipper said as the realization dawned on him. The puppet nodded miserably. "And you're going to die for _real_."


End file.
